Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation

Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation

Jonathan Franzen claimed he won’t write about race because of limited ‘firsthand experience’, while Lionel Shriver hopes objection to ‘cultural appropriation is a passing fad’. So should there be boundaries on what a novelist can write about?

Hari Kunzru

Clearly, if writers were barred from creating characters with attributes that we do not “own” (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on), fiction would be impossible. Stories would be peopled by clones of the author. Since trespassing into otherness is a foundation of the novelist’s work, should we restrict ourselves in some way, so as to avoid doing violence to those who identify with our characters? The injunction to refrain from “cultural appropriation” sounds like a call for censorship, or at best a warning to self-censor, an infringement of the creative liberty to which so many surprising people profess themselves attached.

‘Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities is an act of ethical urgency’ … Hari Kunzru Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

It is true that the politics of offence are used to shut down dissident voices of all kinds, frequently in minority communities, and the understanding of culture as a type of property to which ownership can be definitively assigned is, at the very least, problematic. Should the artist go forth boldly, without fear? Of course, but he or she should also tread with humility. Note that I do not say, “with care”. I don’t believe any subject matter should a priori be off limits to anyone, or that harm necessarily flows from the kind of ventriloquism that all novelists perform. Quite the opposite. Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities, other experiences, is an act of ethical urgency. For those who have never experienced the luxury of normativity, the warm and fuzzy feeling of being the world’s default setting, humility in the face of otherness seems like a minimal demand. Yet it appears that for some, the call to listen before speaking, to refrain from asserting immediate authority, is so unfamiliar that it feels outrageous. I’m being silenced! My freedom is being abridged! Norm is unaccustomed to humility because he has grown up as master of the house. All the hats are his to wear. For the deviant others, who came in by the kitchen door, it has always been expected, even demanded.

Good writers transgress without transgressing, in part because they are humble about what they do not know. They treat their own experience of the world as provisional. They do not presume. They respect people, not by leaving them alone in the inviolability of their cultural authenticity, but by becoming involved with them. They research. They engage in reciprocal relationships. It does not seem like a particular infringement of liberty to pass through the world without being its owner, unless someone else is continually asserting property rights over the ground beneath your feet. The panicked tone of the accusations of censorship leads me to suspect that what is being asserted has little to do with artistic freedom per se, and everything to do with a bitter fight to retain normative status, and the privileges that flow from it. The solution is simple, my fearful friends. Give up. Accept that some things are not for you, and others are not about you. You will find you have lost nothing. It may even feel like a weight off your shoulders. Put down that burden and pull up a chair. You might hear something you haven’t heard before. You will, at least, hear some new stories.

Kamila Shamsie

To continually return to the same subset of humanity, and declare that there is no one else who imaginatively engages you or who you know how to imaginatively engage with, strikes me as one of the most dispiriting things a writer can say.Kamila Shamsie, Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for DIAGEO

One of the novels I love is Peter Hobbs’s In the Orchard, the Swallows. It’s set entirely in the north of Pakistan – and is beautiful and true (a better word than “authentic”). If anyone tried to dispute Hobbs’s right to have written that book (and I should say, every Pakistani I know who has read it has expressed only admiration), I would be the first in line to defend him, and it. But the point about the book is that it’s wonderfully and sensitively written; it has no interest in peddling stereotypes, or making great claims about the place in which it’s located; there is no whiff of arrogance or entitlement. I don’t know what went on in Hobbs’s mind when he wrote it but I feel fairly confident it wasn’t: “How dare anyone dispute my right to write this?”

In fact, if you do start with an attitude that fails to understand that there are very powerful reasons for people to dispute your right to tell a story – reasons that stem from historical, political or social imbalances, you’ve already failed to understand the place and people who you purport to want to write about. That’s a pretty lousy beginning, and I wouldn’t want to read the fiction that comes out of it. Far better to understand the reasons, and perhaps even use those reasons as a way into character and story.

Lionel Shriver's full speech: 'I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad'

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So by all means, let’s have a broadening of the imagination. That doesn’t mean you have to leave the patch of ground on which you live – but it would be helpful if you looked at who else is on that patch of ground with you. To continually return to the same subset of humanity, and declare that there is no one else who imaginatively engages you or who you know how to imaginatively engage with, strikes me as one of the most dispiriting things a writer can say.

In short: don’t set boundaries around your imagination. But don’t be lazy or presumptuous in your writing either. Not for reasons of “political correctness”, but for reasons of good fiction.

Aminatta Forna

‘Every writer is free to write about what they want, but that does not mean the work cannot be critiqued’ … Aminatta Forna Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Literature is an imaginative art. To suggest that a writer cannot depict characters unlike themself is patently absurd. Books would have to be peopled with characters exactly like the author. In my case, they would all be Scottish/Sierra Leonian women, who would be required to travel to each other’s countries (presumably Scotland and Sierra Leone), fall in love with each other, betray each other, befriend each other and occasionally shoot each other.

Lionel Shriver’s speech was crass and unhelpful; she turned an important creative question into “whites versus chippy minorities”. Yet writers from minority groups have spoken out at length about being expected only to address certain subjects. My last book was set in Croatia. In the year of publication I answered the question: “Why Croatia?” so many times I began simply to answer: “Why not?”

Jonathan Franzen’s remarks about not being able to write a black woman character because he has never been in love with a black woman made me squirm. He said he has to have experience of loving a category of person before he can write about them. That’s hard to believe for all sorts of practical reasons, but beyond that, writing is about imagining how others think and feel and how that informs their behaviour; it is about offering a different way of seeing and in so doing it creates empathy. I tell my creative writing students: “Don’t write what you know, write what you want to understand.” I write from a place of deep curiosity about the world.

Every writer is free to write about who and what they want, but that does not mean the work cannot be critiqued. People who belong to minority groups have had to live with limiting, irritating and insulting portrayals all our lives, as well as always dying before the end of the movie. I have thrown aside many modern novels because a white writer’s purpose in including a character of colour has been merely to make a point about race or reflect a white character’s value system. It’s bad writing, plain and simple. Shriver wants to be given points for trying. Well, I might do that for my undergraduates, but I won’t do it for a published author. Sorry.

Chris Cleave

‘I do think there is such a thing as shared emotional truth and that its discovery is the purpose of the novel’ … Chris Cleave Photograph: James Emmett

Cultural appropriation is a valid concern to raise, and I’ve long been on record as respecting those who raise it. I do write across boundaries, though. While actively soliciting people’s right to reply (I’ve published all responses, good and bad, on my website for the last decade), I do my best, when I write, to be everyone.

In my novels I cross boundaries of gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and class. That’s the best way I know to tell stories about our world, where those faultlines define our society. I show scenes from both sides, using one character to view another askance. Why? Because my characters’ eyes can be sharper than mine, since my own identity has no lock on a unitary or objective way of seeing things.

I do my research. Sometimes – as when interviewing refugees and torture survivors – I’ve learned things I wish I could unlearn. The violence of the world’s true stories can crack you open. You lose the shape you were moulded in. You take on other forms. How should one judge the healthiness of a writer like that, an empathist, a broken vessel? By the temperature of their work, I think. By its willingness to surrender heat to light.

A good novelist is a good observer – everything else is just style. A writer must be alive to what goes said and unsaid in the world, making themself small until only the reader is reflected in the work. A well-crafted novel is a mirror, and as a reader I don’t mind where the glass was made or how it got its silver. I require only that its reflection is fair.

Readers are mostly ignored in this debate, but the worldly and widely read reader has a hinterland, is quick to spot an agenda and is willing to call out fakes. Readers are more heterogeneous than writers will ever be, and in their multiplicity a book finds its measure of truth.

I do think there is such a thing as shared emotional truth and that its discovery is the purpose of the novel. That’s why people of many different cultures will sometimes cry at the end of an honest book. Even after the characters’ voices have faded, if those voices led me – the reader – to discover a truth for myself, then that experience will move me. It might even crack the mould I was made in.

AL Kennedy

‘Fiction proves that humanity can think of things that never were and then make them’ … AL Kennedy. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Fiction doesn’t appropriate, it creates. That’s the wonder of it. Fiction proves that humanity can think of things that never were and then make them – in this case, not a new government, or a new way of designing cities, or a cure for cancer, but a narrative that can involve any reader in a further imaginative act. When the writer writes, or the reader reads, they’re consenting to be someone other than themselves. The reader of properly crafted work can share emotional and psychological space with a character. This is a practice of empathy, which might not seem as big a deal as good government, or more civilised cities, or cancer cures, but functional fiction is part of the culture that helps create those things, too. Believing in the power of human imagination and experiencing empathy gives you reasons to act and invent on behalf of others.

Currently, the Eng Lit business and our critical establishment prefers to define all writing as autobiographical, journalistic. It isn’t. It never was, and reducing it in such a manner denies us our ability to imagine. Without regular exercise of that ability we abdicate our rights to conscious change.

Inexperienced authors – and uncomprehending observers – can become bewildered when facing the question at the heart of fictional writing: “How do I write someone who isn’t me? I’m not old/young/Asian/anyone other than myself – how can I seem to be?” Bewilderment is natural, but it’s never enough. The appropriate response to character is awe. And then the appropriate response to the creation of any fictional character is a dedication to every possible effort that will let them live effectively for the reader. The human being the writer tries to represent and the human being who is the reader require the author to create accessible humanity. The character must be specific and individual enough to communicate universally.

Every life has to be respected, may be racked by injustice, is deserving of sensitivity – so we write about every life. That’s the only rule and our human duty. Backing away from that duty hands the world to the demagogues and bigots, those who would prefer us not to speak to each other, accurately represented as irreplaceably complex individuals who both reveal and transcend group identities. The passion in that helps create a culture that keeps us safe.

Stella Duffy

‘I want to write and read work that is as multifaceted as our society’ … Stella Duffy. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose for the Observer

In my new novel, London Lies Beneath, as with the 13 other novels I have written, the characters are of different classes, different ethnicities, different genders, different sexualities, different abilities. Not in order to tick boxes, but because that’s how the world is. I’ve written characters that are BAME, white, female, male, disabled, able-bodied, LGBT (individually, not lumped together), from every social class and in several different time periods. I don’t live in a world with only one group of people and I’m not interested in writing about only one group of people.

In The Room of Lost Things, the two protagonists are an older white working-class man and a younger British Asian man. Set in south London, where I live, the book has a large range of characters, especially in terms of race and ethnicity – and more than one reviewer commented that I was “exposing readers’ prejudices” by not stating immediately if a character was black or mixed race or Asian. I really wasn’t. I mentioned race or ethnicity – including that of white characters – when it was relevant to the story. However, if a reviewer assumes that a white writer will only write white characters then they certainly need to look at their preconceptions.

“Write what you know” is a tired maxim that most writers abandon eventually, “write who you are” is even more restrictive. I want to write and read work that is as multifaceted as our society. I think it’s vital we write widely and inclusively to help shift publishing from the mostly middle class, mostly white place it is now. Men need to write women knowing that they are writing from a place of privilege – that they are likely to earn more than women and are more likely to be reviewed. White writers need to write BAME characters knowing there are many more white writers published. The same for straight people, and able-bodied people, middle-class people, and on.

We can write who we are not and do it well if we write with passion, strength – and care. We’re bound to get it wrong sometimes, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. If we want our writing to reflect the truth, then our characters and their experiences must be as diverse as the world in which we live.